Addressing The Challenge of Data Agility

We live in an era of vast amounts of data. According to IBM, 90% of all the data on the Internet today was created in the last two years, equalling 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. Data is expected to reach 10.5 zettabytes by 2020—that’s 21 zeros! Meanwhile, worldwide corporate data is estimated to double every 14 months.

So it’s not surprising that the new challenge for companies is how best to keep up with this explosion of data. More and more, businesses in every industry are grappling with how to organize and quickly extract essential details in data for analysis and action.

While traditional databases and tools are powerful, they often require a series of steps and assistance from IT personnel before data is ready for analysis. Such tools also don’t cope well with the constantly-changing variety and format of data.

Consequently, the legacy systems that businesses have relied on for many years are simply not agile enough to meet the growing needs of most organizations today.

What is data agility?

To remain competitive, today’s businesses must strive for data agility. This term refers to being able to rapidly access and utilize data without barriers.

As data continues to increase, the need for efficient ways to manage it increases as well. More businesses are finding that the speed of processing and analyzing their data can make the difference between winning and losing their next customer.

Characteristics of data agility

True data agility means that business users can easily:

  1. Combine data from multiple sources without long preparation times
  2. Integrate structured and unstructured data
  3. Combine operational and historic data to enable immediate comparison
  4. Create visualization tools to spot trends that would otherwise be hidden
  5. Access all available data, instead of explicitly specifying which data is needed
  6. Create and share their own analytical models of data
  7. Accomplish all the above while ensuring security and compliance management

How to achieve data agility

Many systems have been created to solve the data explosion challenge; however, most of them require time-consuming retraining and adoption time. Business leaders are understandably concerned about such major system overhauls and are reluctant to abandon the powerful systems that have served them well for so long.  

Datarails’ data agility platform offers the best of both worlds: The robustness of traditional tools, with the flexibility of a new system. It provides superior data agility and immediate impact—and it accomplishes this with zero adoption time for business users.